The man who wrote it was Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, born in 1838, one of the commanding intellects of nineteenth-century Bengal and, by common consent, the father of the modern Bengali novel. His books, from ‘Durgeshnandini’ in 1865 to ‘Devi Chaudhurani’, had already reshaped Bengali fiction and given a colonised people a literature of their own. By day, remarkably, he was a deputy magistrate in the service of the British government he would come to help undermine. He first published the poem Vande Mataram on 7 November 1875, in Bangadarshan, the influential literary journal he himself edited. Seven years later he did something quietly momentous. He wove the lyric into his 1882 novel ‘Anandamath’, a stirring tale of ascetic warrior-monks, the santans, who rise against injustice in the name of the motherland. In the book, the song is their hymn, sung by imagined men marching towards an imagined battle. The novel itself was set amid the upheavals of late eighteenth-century Bengal, a land emptied by famine and misrule, and in its pages the Mother appears in three faces, the land as she once was, as she is now, and as she might one day become. The words, however, refused to stay imaginary.
